120132 AR Literature Course (Interactive) = Literature 1/2 (MA) American/North American Lit./Studies (2010S)

Since the early accounts of discovery and exploration of the New World the imagination of European writers has been fired by the possibilities of finding an edenic place or founding a utopian community on the other side of the Atlantic. The accounts of real or imaginary travels composed by Anglophone authors from Thomas More, Francis Bacon to Jonathan Swift present or include the depiction of alternative societies which simultaneously reflects such desires and reveal the shortcomings of the society at home.
The 19th century saw both the attempted realization of such projects in North America ranging from ascetic communities (such as the Shakers) to notorious communes. The century also witnessed the gradual substitution of the location of such alternative societies in time rather than in space.
The interactive course will provide an opportunity to study the perennial human desire to find or construct such alternative societies and to relate these attempts to the growing awareness of social problems in urban North America and the desire for social and technological improvements but also to various political trends.
Among the texts to be considered will be Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887, W. F. Skinner, Walden Two, Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Additional texts by Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle), Walker Percy (The Thanatos Syndrome), and Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake) will illustrate this genre which is earlier represented by Ignatius Donelly, Caesar's Column, and classic dystopias such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell, 1984, and Jewgenij Samjatin, My. The latter texts mirror the emergence of a genre which extrapolates from undesirable trends and tendencies in contemporaneous societies and often include the depiction of post-nuclear worlds and spaces following an ecological disaster.